Abstract
A prototype for an Irish-English place name database of
Achillbeg Island, Co. Mayo, Ireland has been created using ArcGIS
Desktop software and written documentary information.
Background information relating to Achillbeg Island obtained
from a variety of resources and includes information on the
location, geology, prehistory, historic information, and Irish
language issues included.
Place name information was then organized using ArcGIS
Desktop software to create a file geodatabase that included raster
fields to allow display of relevant photographs of the area linked
to their place names.
The database information was then displayed using both native
ArcMap functions and those of Google Earth. Informal evaluation of
both software platforms confirmed desirable features to both, but
that neither was an ideal user platform.
Introduction
What’s in a name? What’s that called? Who remembers where
that is? All good questions that relate to toponymy.
Toponymy is the branch of onomastics (study of
proper names) which is concerned with ‘place’ and ‘name’(Monmonier, 2006 , p.
9). This
report deals with a small effort in that area.
This paper outlines the construction of a prototype for an
Irish-English place name Geographic Information System (GIS)
database using the small island of Achillbeg in Co. Mayo, Ireland as
its model. The model will have fields for Irish names, English
translations, an attempt at an English pronunciation, and will
include photographs of selected locations. After the prototype was
completed, ArcMap and Google Earth were compared as platforms to
display this type of information.
The genesis for this project was from a paper given at the
Environmental Systems Research Institute,
Inc. (ESRI) User Conference in August 2008. The paper was an
updated report on the Native Names Project coordinated by a member
of the Coeur d’Alene Tribe (Henriksen, 2008 ) (Coeur d'Alene Tribe GIS Program - Native
Names Project, 2006
)
. That report described their efforts to
collect, maintain, and protect sensitive native names in their
current tribal areas, and to also influence the Geographic Names
Information System (GNIS) in efforts to provide an appropriate name
for features that would appear in ‘official’ mapping.
The major issues I could see from the Native Names Project
were that native-speakers of certain language groups were dying out,
that local knowledge of ‘place’ was disappearing, and the need to
maintain security of the information within a tribal governing
cultural framework.
What resonated for me was that I had just returned from time
spent in the west coast of Ireland working with the Achill
Archaeological Field School (Welcome to the
Archaeological Field School 2009, 2008
)
and had visited a very small, now
uninhabited island that also had an excellent place name resource.
While the Irish language is not at a current risk of disappearing,
the previous residents of this island are aging and one can easily
image having only this documentary evidence for this area’s toponymy
rather than informants. I will likely be returning to Achill many
times in the coming years and I would like to be able to add
something to help preserve and maintain this information. One goal
is to collect local Irish-speaker’s pronunciation of these place
names to add to the database.
The primary goal of this project was to
develop a prototype in ArcGIS Desktop for a place name database of
Achillbeg Island using the documentation from Achillbeg – Life of an
Island (Beaumont,
2005
). The secondary goal is to
then compare the user-interactive functions of ArcMap and then
Google Earth.
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